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Virus Warning!!!

There is another one.

There is a e-mail virus spreading again. And I know that somehow my flightsim.com e-mail address is sending infected e-mails out. If you get a simple e-mail that just says "Hi" in the title, or has an attachment with the same title, do not open it, delete it. I did not send it, and I have no clue how it is coming from my e-mail.

RE: BTW

Get a programe called mailwasher. How it works, it allow's you to read the header and address of your emails directly from your ISP's server without the email getting onto your computer, and if you don't like it you can bounce it back to sender.

RE: BTW

Don't 'bounce' a virus email back to the sender. All email viruses these days spoof the sender's address so you are just forwarding the virus on to someone who probably doesn't yet have it, and at the very least you are wasting bandwidth.

What is almost as bad as the viruses themselves are all the miserable antiquated virus filters out there that send a message to the 'sender' telling him he has a virus (when he doesn't). I have to discard as many of those false reports as I do virus messages. There are also probably a lot of inexperienced users who receive these false reports and are then afraid to use their systems even though they are clean.

I wish that these email viruses would do real damage to the recipient's system instead of just wasting time and bandwidth. Then all the morons who can't be bothered to protect themselves against viruses would soon smarten up and it would put an end to this nonsense.

RE: Virus Warning!!!

Brian, and all flightsimmmers, if you experienced what Brian did -- you may not actually have been infected. First of all, I did not receive any infected emails from you. Secondly, if you had your antivirus set for auto-update (both Norton and McAfee) you probably were already inoculated against Novarg.

What you saw was someone who was not protected and got stung. They had your email address in their address book. The virus then sent itself to you from there and spoofed our webmaster address. It is highly unlikely that you got it from the forums our our servers because we are extremely diligent about virus protection and member privacy. But, if NAV or McAfee was updated, it stripped out the virus attachment and you just opened the text version of the email. No problem, at least with this virus. As a safety precaution, I turn off my preview pane because many viruses, such as NIMDA, can infect just from being previewed.

Norton probably already did catch it. Check your quarantine report and you'll see a ton of Novarg files that have been quarantined. That's your indication that NAV did its job. You probably were not infected. But, just to be safe, you should run a virus scan and manually update your Live Update.